I’ve just won Wimbledon and I’m a famous talented musician loved the world over. Well, in my head anyway. I’m a daydreamer, and to paraphrase John Lennon, it turns out I’m not the only one.

I started wondering about daydreams after I spotted a special offer for a dinner for two of €199. A few years ago, this would’ve been within the realms of possibility for me, but now, in the vice-grip of the recession, it’s nothing short of fantasy. Was this my imagination helping me cope with my change in lifestyle, or the beginning of the end? I decided to examine my daydreams. Behind the implausible storylines were recurring themes and echoes of emotion – basically feelings and goals I’d pushed to the side. The recession hasn’t only changed the way I live; it has changed the way I think.

Daydreaming is useful to identify hidden wishes, overcome frustration, and to provide momentary relief from the onslaught of reality, all of which make it seem tailor made for a recession. Up until recently, daydreaming was thought to be a kind of laziness, even a mental illness. But now daydreaming is regarded as a form of imagination and a normal component of mental activity. Children spend much of their time daydreaming in the guise of play, and adults, despite all our self-important seriousness, spend at least one-third of waking life in our own worlds. Picture the brain: at the front is the frontal lobe, at the side is the parietal lobe, both of which work together to control decision-making, impulse control, judgement, memory, emotion, and socialisation. These two parts of the brain are just as active when we’re daydreaming as when we’re trying to keep it together in a Saturday crowd on Shop Street, which may explain why some daydreams can feel so intense.

Usually daydreaming occurs when we’re not obliged to engage with the world around us, like when we’re lying in bed, making dinner, or going for a walk. With the body and brain more relaxed, thoughts aren’t directed in a way we’re used to and so unusual and creative ideas can surface.

It’s in this way that creative thinkers in art, business, and science are able to harness their imagination and originality. Daydreams are also ways to practice feelings and reactions to events, as if we’re sort of test-driving emotions before unleashing them onto the world.

This idea of practicing emotions is a major element of child’s play. Children are serious about their play and put a lot energy into it; try getting them to go to sleep if they’re mothering a sick doll back to health or storming the Alamo in Cowboys and Indians. Children regularly create new worlds or rearrange this world in a way that helps them come to terms with and understand themselves. Without life experience to guide them, they fill in the gaps by making up stories that resemble real situations. They’re able to separate their play from reality and link their imagined worlds to the real world. This connection with their imagination is the crucial difference between child’s play and fantasy.

Adult daydreams are often shrugged off as juvenile or irrelevant, or else we hide them away from the world in fear of revealing too much. Most daydreams can be divided into themes of ambition (from winning an Oscar, getting the dream job, doing things differently at work, having more friends) or those with an erotic quality about them (marrying (or not) a hot athlete or rock star, finding Mr Right, or Mr Right Now, among other lurid scenarios).

The biggest scandal about daydreams isn’t the discomfort that might arise from examining them, but rather if we don’t examine them at all. By following the example of children, a lot can be gained by trying to understand what daydreams mean and finding connection to the real world.

I’m obviously the darkest horse in history to win Wimbledon, but daydreaming about it keeps me astute to the idea that the only way Roger Federer has won it six times is through practice, hard work, focus, and determination, and if that’s all I ever get out of this daydream, and I apply it to my own life, I’m already on the right track. Alternatively, maybe I just like hot men in tight shorts, which is still valuable knowledge.

Daydreaming is really just another way of visualising and simulating ideas and events long before they happen. These kinds of visualisation techniques can be a powerful form of  motivation. Businesses spend truckloads of money training their employees on visualising success, professional athletes do it, and most actors who win an Oscar bleat on about how they’ve been rehearsing their speech since they were a kid back home in the trailer park in Tennessee. If we tend to daydream to escape reality and deal with frustrations, it makes sense that the recession is prone to bring out the daydreamers in people. But daydreaming isn’t just mindless escape, it’s one of the most useful coping strategies we have to explore emotions and to consider alternatives, and even better, it’s free. Ironically, my daydreams have helped me direct my life and reinforced my need for discipline, for love, and for patience. Perhaps this is the right time to indulge, to reconnect with our dreams, and find the way to make them real.